Empowering Patients with Self-Service Transportation Benefits

Alex Lekacz
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Traditionally, healthcare providers are paid for each individual service separately provided to a patient throughout treatment. This payment structure favors quantity of services over the quality of services. As such, care can become wasteful and fragmented, with minimal coordination across providers and health care settings. Various population health initiatives and innovative models such as bundled payments are focused on instead aligning incentives around quality, allowing providers to work closely together across all specialties and settings. Take a look at how we are empowering patients with self-service transportation benefits for specialized groups.

Mount Sinai Health Partners (MSHP) is focused on developing these models. MSHP is a clinically integrated network comprised of Mount Sinai’s full-time faculty physicians, associated community physicians, and seven hospitals spanning Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. MSHP embraces population health management and payment models that reward value-based arrangements and greater accountability for cost and quality.

One such arrangement is between MSHP and the largest property services workers union in the country. This arrangement provides comprehensive low-cost health benefits to 120,000 union members and their families. Together, MSHP and the workers union designed a program for workers needing to undergo Total Joint Replacement. Total Joint Replacement (TJR) is often a surgery that can be extremely disruptive to someone’s day-to-day life. This creates various barriers, such as transportation, for patients.

As such, Roundtrip partnered with MSHP last year to develop a transportation benefit and to coordinate rides for union members to have procedures done through the Joint Replacement Program. The program is designed to help union members restore their mobility and to have a positive, supported experience from the initial consult all the way through surgery and recovery.

Through the program, Roundtrip provides each patient with a unique online link that allows them to schedule their rides to-and-from procedures, removing transportation as a barrier to obtaining essential care. Patients can schedule rides online or through a mobile app, indicating the pick-up and drop-off locations, as well as timing, and the bill is picked up by MSHP.